Two Cheers for the Democratic Establishment?

I’m going to be writing a monthly column for UnHerd going forward. What I’m planning to do with this for the Substack is send out a link to an article every time one comes out, then provide further thoughts here. I’ve always found word limits stifling, but publications always have them, for good reason. The beauty of the Substack though is that I can go on as long as I want.

The UnHerd article is a review of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, on the coverup of Biden’s decline.

Joe Biden was born to be a politician. Cass Sunstein, the legal scholar and former Obama administration official, recently recalled nine different experiences with Biden or anecdotes he had heard over the years. Among these was the time in 2022 when he joined a meeting between Biden and Emmanuel Macron at the White House.

Sunstein imagined that Biden might not remember him, as they hadn’t seen each other in years. Yet Biden took Sunstein’s arm and recited his whole biography to the French President, including “details about my life that I only vaguely remember[ed].” But that was only a rare glimpse of a Biden who was no more. A younger Biden would have been able to assert leadership, make the case for his policies, and take arguments about his vision directly to voters. That is not the man we got. Rather, we ended up with a greatly diminished to barely functioning commander in chief.

Yet contrary to the cartoonish narratives of the Right, the debacle revealed not only the weaknesses of the Democratic coalition and mainstream media — but also some of their strengths.

Read the whole thing here.

When a book gets as much attention as this one has, I approach the topic from the perspective of where I can add some value. Yglesias does this when he notes that the question of why the Biden administration governed so far to the left remains unanswered, given that it was apparently run by a board of old moderate white guys. Who exactly was responsible for an executive order “direct[ing] the Federal Government to further build equity into the everyday business of government”? Michael Tracey provides his own unique touch when he discusses the book in the context of reviewing George Clooney’s smug libporn Broadway play, which I found highly entertaining.

But as fun as it is to laugh at Clooney, I think he’s actually a hero in this story, and his role demonstrates an important point that people miss. Yes, those around Biden, and to a lesser extent the Democratic establishment and the left more generally, were lying to us about the president’s condition, or at the very least refused to see what was before their own eyes. They faced accountability for this at the ballot box, and those most responsible have taken a reputational hit, which is how all of this is supposed to work.

Nonetheless, as explained in the book review, another piece of this story that I feel compelled to note is that liberals, the media, and the Democratic establishment at their worst appear much more honest and honorable than the Trump-led Republican Party.

Take the lead up to the Hur investigation. Here I’ll quote from Original Sin at some length. Try to read this passage while not only judging the actions of Biden and those around him on their own merits, but comparatively, relative to how you would expect those in Trump’s orbit to behave under similar circumstances.

Hur’s path to those recordings began on November 2, 2022, a few days before the midterms, when one of Biden’s personal attorneys, Patrick Moore, found classified documents improperly stored in boxes that Biden had taken with him after serving as vice president. Classified documents were on the minds of Biden’s attorneys; Trump was in the middle of a standoff with the Justice Department about his possession of such materials, leading to an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022.

Moore alerted Bauer, who contacted White House Counsel Stuart Delery, who discussed it with Richard Sauber — a seasoned Democratic lawyer brought to the White House Counsel’s Office in anticipation of Republicans taking over the House and launching investigations. At eight that evening, Delery and Sauber phoned the general counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration to let him know what had happened and to ask for archivists who could handle the documents that night.

The next morning, archivists were shown the documents and the three boxes where they were found: nine classified documents up to the Top Secret level, with some considered “Sensitive Compartmented Information.” Forty-four pages.

The public knew nothing about this, but on Wednesday, November 9, the day after the midterm elections, the FBI began investigating. On November 10, Jay Bratt, the chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, wrote to Bauer to tell him what steps they needed to take, and warning that “the prospect that classified material may have been stored in an unsecure location over a prolonged period may have national security implications.”

Biden’s personal attorney ratted on him! To one of Biden’s top aides no less. Elsewhere in the book, Robert Bauer is presented as one of those loyalists who went out of his way to hide Biden’s condition. Lawyers and top government officials are supposed to behave ethically and usually it’s not that impressive when they do. We take it for granted. But the fact that it is impossible to imagine MAGA living up to what have traditionally been normal standards of ethics should be something we talk about a lot more. I think that for leftists, it’s so obvious that MAGA’s corruption and fealty to Trump are off the charts that there is no point in making this argument when discussing Biden’s presidency. To do so would just seem like excuse making and an attempt to avoid accountability. Yet conservatives are in complete denial about the ethics gap, and hopefully I can do some good here by pointing out the obvious to the rightists among my audience.

Take also this passage on the Hunter Biden trial.

The facts of the case were straightforward: In October 2018, Hunter bought a gun and, on the federal form, marked that he was not a drug user. He kept the gun for eleven days before Hallie discovered it, panicked, and threw it in a grocery store trash can, where it was discovered.

The prosecution had ample evidence that Hunter had been using drugs in the months before and after he purchased the gun. The defense conceded that Hunter had used drugs in the past, but argued that Hunter did not believe himself to be an addict when he bought the gun, given his time in rehab in August 2018…

After Beau’s death, Hunter began having an affair with Beau’s widow, Hallie, hiding it from Kathleen, to whom he was still married. Hunter introduced Hallie to crack; she, too, became addicted. Hunter also had a relationship with a young stripper and designer whom he would have shop for his daughters, since they were around the same age.

After years of denying or sidestepping questions about it, Hunter now watched prosecutors bring out a laptop with a serial number matching his Apple account that had been left behind at a repair shop. The FBI had confiscated the MacBook and now witnesses confirmed the authenticity of much of the content on it.

Hunter’s ex-wife, Kathleen, told the jury she found a crack pipe at their home weeks after Beau’s death. Hunter confessed he was using it.

Prosecutors played hours of the self-narrated audiobook version of Hunter’s 2021 memoir, which they now framed as a partial confession to his drug use around the time he bought the gun. As his voice filled the courtroom, his sister Ashley—who had struggled with her own addiction—began to cry.

The gut punch for the family came when Hunter’s eldest daughter, Naomi, took the stand. Hunter and his team had asked her to testify. She was eager and proud to help her dad, attesting that he was a reformed man.

She testified about visiting her dad while he was in rehab in August 2018. “He seemed like the clearest that I had seen him since my uncle died,” she said. She also noted that when she saw him in October—soon after he had bought the gun—Hunter “seemed great, he seemed hopeful.”

But during her cross-examination, the judge unexpectedly allowed the prosecutors to submit into evidence text messages between Hunter and Naomi that told a different story about that week in October. He was erratic and distant, firing off late-night texts and requests. After having trouble setting up a time to meet, Naomi texted Hunter: “so no c u!?”

Prosecutors read her next message aloud: “I’m really sorry, Dad, I can’t take this. I don’t know what to say, I just miss you so much, I just want to hang out with you.”

Grilling her about the days she wanted to see her dad, prosecutors asked: “Did he tell you he was meeting with someone named Frankie?”

“I don’t remember,” she said, flustered.

“Did he tell you that he had Frankie come to his hotel room?” they pressed. A previous witness had referred to a dealer named Frankie.

“No. I don’t remember,” she said, her voice cracking.

“Did he tell you he had given someone named Frankie an access code to his Wells Fargo account?” they asked.

Naomi, holding back tears, managed to give a weak “No.”

She left the courtroom and walked briskly to her holding room.

Afterward, Biden’s family and many friends packed into Hunter’s holding room, trying to come to grips with what had just happened.

That is some high drama! Now, Biden did end up pardoning his son, along with many others close to him, and we can criticize those moves. But he could’ve pardoned Hunter at any time! He could’ve even removed the Trump-appointed prosecutor who brought the case at the beginning of his presidency, or hired a Pam Bondi type at DOJ to make sure that his family was protected. Or maybe he couldn’t have done these things, because there would have been too much pushback within his party. But that’s precisely the point.

Democrats actually care. The only reason Biden had to watch his family go through all this was that he was the leader of a coalition in which things like the rule of law matter. Again, you can criticize Biden’s pardon after Hunter was convicted, but you have to recognize that the only reason things got to that point is because Democrats are ethically superior to Republicans.

I don’t want to be a guy who, whenever Democrats or liberal elites screw up, simply stands there and says “But MAGAs are worse!” I’m not here to deny that elites have flaws. As I point out in the review, the Biden cover up was much worse and longer lasting than what most outside observers thought.

That said, to have a reasonable perspective on political issues, you cannot avoid taking a comparative perspective. When you hear someone talking about something Democratic elites did that was incompetent or dishonest, there is almost always an implicit case being made that you should therefore support Trump, or at least not succumb to Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is the Michael Shellenberger problem. The message is either that elites are worse than MAGA, or that in terms of ethics and corruption, the two sides of the political spectrum are so similar that everything is basically a wash.

This perspective is simply indefensible. Imagine someone’s main issue is the need for secular governance. He decides that Gulf Arab monarchies are too religious, and becomes a supporter of ISIS instead. This is the exact same thing someone is doing when they pretend to care about norms, democratic institutions, the rule of law, or basic fairness but then favor the Trump movement over Democrats.

The type of false equivalency conservatives now engage in is the road to hell. You’re not going to get perfect elites. In the grand scheme of things, having a country where a president allows his family to be humiliated in the way the Bidens were is a remarkable achievement. It is not something we will be able to count on if MAGA ends up shattering old norms instead of ultimately being understood as an aberration in American history.

We need to keep two thoughts in mind: elites make a lot of mistakes, and the main alternative to them is worse. I see liberals grappling honestly with the fact that there was a major coverup surrounding Biden’s health, and although the political left as a general matter does not come out looking good, there was dissension within its ranks, which is why they were eventually able to force a sitting president out of his reelection race. On the other side, I don’t see many prominent conservatives out there making an issue of Trump’s corruption and lack of ethics. This is part of the reason why I spend so much time criticizing MAGA from a right-wing perspective. The market for takes on how elites have failed is somewhat saturated, and many on the left are facing the flaws of their own side. The right, in contrast, is currently in greater need of a dose of reality.